Simple Local Web servers November 27th, 2013

I’ve had this post saved as a draft for two years, so I finally decided to clean it up a little and publish it in case anyone else finds the information useful.

In web development, for both client and server testing, it’s often very useful to have a local web server running in order to serve test cases. This post outlines a few quick and easy ways to run a local web server that don’t involve installing Apache or nginx and all their dependencies.

You can then type an arbitrary response back to the browser, terminating the stream with Ctrl+C:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html

Hello <b>world</b>
^C

The hello world HTML page shows up in your browser as you would expect. You could just as easily use an existing file on your filesystem as input for the response:

brandon@dexter:~$ nc -l 8000 < http_response_file.txt

Another option to consider, especially if you already have test cases or other static content ready to serve, is Python’s SimpleHTTPServer class. You don’t even need to write a script to run one of these servers locally:

This time, hitting http://localhost:8000 in your browser will bring up a directory listing with your current working directory as the document root. Your requests are also logged on your Python terminal:localhost - - [16/May/2011 14:55:36] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -

On a separate but related note, you can get a local SMTP testing server, which only logs to the console and doesn’t actually send mail, by running: